Photo gallery: Pioneer HTZLX61You know a format's gained mass-market acceptance when it features on home-theatre-in-a-box systems, as Blu-ray now frequently does. But Pioneer's not trying to rush people into enjoying Blu-ray's HD benefits, instead saying its new HTZLX61 system is "ready for Blu-ray whenever you are". Most people already are — we'd say — but despite the slogan, this system doesn't actually play Blu-ray discs.
Design and features
The business end of the HTZLX61 is a single full-width (430mm) head unit equipped with two HDMI inputs and one out. It'll play all manner of disc formats, except the obvious one. We're not sure why Pioneer chose not to include Blu-ray in its repertoire, especially at the price and given the company is already producing stand-alone BD players. However, you can hook one up via one of the HDMI inputs.
The box is sleek and button-free, or so it appears. A glossy top panel includes touch controls for the basic disc functions, and a flap hides the disc drawer, a USB port and 3.5mm jacks for headphones and the included set-up mic. The remote handles the vast majority of controls, but offers no learning capability or backlighting.
The system features small cube and wedge-like speakers which can be used in a couple of configurations. You can either place them in a conventional 5.1 arrangement with the rear surrounds placed behind, or instead placing them alongside the "main" satellites upfront to provide pseudo-surround from the same spot. The system features twin centre cube speakers that can also get in on the act and you can make a neat stack of all the satellites on either side of the TV to provide front surround, taking up minimum space and doing away with long speaker cables across the room. A passive 8-inch subwoofer, also in high gloss black, completes the speaker ensemble.
Performance
As is now the norm, an automatic set-up procedure — in this case known as MCACC — measures, calibrates and sets everything up, before you do anything else. Some of these systems are a bit hit and miss, but MCACC is quite thorough and to our ears, pretty accurate as well.
We kicked off using all the speakers up front, to hear if the "Front Stage Surround Advance Mode" actually worked. Again, this is a hard act to pull off successfully and very few technologies actually do so. Usually there's a compromise and the Pioneer's no different here. It did manage to soundstage effects from a DVD quite convincingly, thanks largely to upward firing drivers in both the front and surround satellites, so you do get an impression of scale as well as depth from Dolby Digital and DTS encoded DVDs. But front to back panning action, such as the space battle sequence at the start of Star Wars IV: Revenge of the Sith lacked the all-enveloping spread and placement of effects that really make those few minutes a magical surround-sound spectacle. Moving the surrounds to their conventional position behind the listener improved the sense of surround effects placement and overall ambience.
For a small system, the Pioneer can pack quite a punch, including the small passive subwoofer, which dished out impressive bass for its size. It does have its limits though, as the Tripod emerging from the street scene in Spielberg's War of the Worlds soon demonstrated. Push the volume up towards its limits and the massive bass dynamic power of this action scene had the Pioneer in a flap. Truth be said though, the same can happen to far more capable AV separates and bigger active subwoofers, so it's not surprising that this tiny Pioneer system knows when to call it quits.
Visually, the HTZLX61 upconverts DVD to 1080p and the output image quality is excellent from the SD format. The same Star Wars DVD, which was shot straight to HD, showed just how good a job the Pioneer does resolving well-encoded DVDs like this. The image was bright; colours were well rendered and looked natural — skintones especially — and there's a lot of detail on offer. We won't harp on about it, but it's a shame this Pioneer doesn't go the whole hog and play Blu-ray, then it really would look good.
Spinning CDs is another thing this Pioneer system is happy to do, and musically it holds a pretty good tune. Subwoofer and satellites integrated well and using the various modes, such as Pro Logic II Music and Ext Stereo, which gives you a 5.1 sound from a stereo source, proved easy to listen to. Despite their tiny size, the satellites created a fairly broad stereo soundstage, and looked well as long as they weren't too far apart. There was also a decent sense of stereo depth, which you don't often get with this type of small speaker.
Conclusion
Apart from the glaringly obvious omission, this Pioneer home theatre system has a lot going for it. If you're not quite ready to take the Blu-ray plunge, and fancy a nice-looking bit of inconspicuous movie and music-playing gear to complement your shiny black flat-screen TV, this system will do the job nicely.
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